


drop your guard

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [47]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Disabled Character, M/M, Memory, Mentally Ill Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:23:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2227215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Steve, I can't tell the difference between what I actually remember and what you've told me by now, and that makes this as pointless as the rest," he says, and he says it light and casual and quick, like Steve's going to somehow miss what that sentence <i>says</i> if Bucky dances over it quick enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	drop your guard

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it. This was from a Hurt/Comfort Bingo prompt: "gaslighting"

Steve wakes up out of a dream that isn't so much bad as disturbing, one with people's faces melting and an ominous sense of pressure that doesn't make sense in the dream or coming out of it. Not even half-awake, he wonders what kind of miasma of subconscious half-thoughts _that_ could have come out of, and what he should try to think less about to avoid a repeat. Because if he could avoid a repeat, he'd really like to. 

He's on his stomach, worked most of the way under the duvet with his arms tangled up in his pillow, and he knows by the feel of the room, even before he pushes himself up a little to finish waking up and hopefully shake the last edges of the dream, that Bucky's not asleep. 

The curtains are open, and a mostly-full moon is more than enough light to see by, even if it still leeches most of the colour away. Bucky's sitting up in bed beside him; there's a small boxboard box beside one ankle, small piles of small-ish pieces of paper here and there. He has one knee bent up and one knee resting on the bed, out to the side, and Steve has one of those moments where he remembers being small and sick and bleary and waking up to see Bucky sitting just like this, on a much smaller bed with worn out blankets and piles of the baseball cards they used to collect. 

There were still piles of them in Bucky's place when they both left, in almost worn-out boxes. Steve wonders what ever happened to them, when neither he or Bucky ever came back.

Here and now, though, Steve recognizes the box and the papers, and asks, "Should I be worried?" because he's still half-asleep and unsettled by the dream and it makes him tactless and blunt. He glances around, catches sight of the little warm lump of Abrikoska at the foot of the bed in full kitten-sleep and takes some care not to accidentally boot her onto the floor. 

Bucky shakes his head, sits back against the headboard and lets his bent leg straighten out. "No," he says, running his right hand through his hair. "I'm honestly just killing time. I finished the book I was reading and I I ended up thinking about this and it didn't matter, so I went and got it." 

Steve shifts over onto his side, so he's not craning his neck so much, and frowns slightly. There are two neat-ish piles on the bedside table, one of blue and red thread, the other of pins. When he'd helped Bucky clean up the floor, pick up all the scattered pieces of his scattered memory-web, they'd honestly just shoved it into the box without looking. Steve'd just wanted it all out of the way, gone for a while: out of sight, out of mind. 

He hadn't known if he should be convincing Bucky to throw it out or to keep it or just be keeping his mouth shut, but what it brought on had scared the shit out of him, so he wanted it hidden for a while. 

"'Didn't matter'?" Steve echoes, and Bucky takes a breath before he sits up. 

"This shit," and he picks up a pile of mostly pages torn out of notebooks, with some print-outs of newspaper articles, scribbled with names, stuff that would have been linked together with red thread when it was up on the wall, "probably won't ever make any fucking coherent sense no matter what I do." He drops it, a little further away from him, voice heavy with resignation and disgust. "I don't even fucking know what I'd do if it did. So fuck it. Doesn't matter, anyway." 

Steve watches his face and doesn't believe that, not entirely. Thinks that it's virtue out of necessity; that if Bucky thought he could piece it all together he would. And then he'd run the memories like punishment, reels and reels worth of things to hate himself for. 

Frankly, Steve's not sure that consigning it to the chaos and fog isn't the better idea even if there _were_ a chance for anything else. Not sure there aren't some things not _worth_ remembering.

"And the rest?" Steve asks, and Bucky smiles one of his twisted up smiles, but the one that's mostly got _tired_ behind it, the _I'm too tired to be embarrassed_ kind. 

"Steve, I can't tell the difference between what I actually remember and what you've told me by now, and that makes this as pointless as the rest," he says, and he says it light and casual and quick, like Steve's going to somehow miss what that sentence _says_ if Bucky dances over it quick enough. 

He doesn't. He _can't_. And it isn't like Steve didn't sort of know, but the words make it different and make it a lot heavier, a lot more vast. 

He rests his hand on the knee that's bent out to the side, and after a moment, when Bucky lets the breath he's quietly holding go, Steve says, "Thanks for letting me," and he means it, even if he keeps his voice light. Bucky smiles the half twisted smile again. Rests his right hand on Steve's, slides his palm over Steve's forearm before pulling his hand back, folding his arms and leaning on the headboard again. 

"It's only reality," he says, not even pretending he means it. "Who gives a shit?" 

"You," Steve says. He feels his mouth quirk. "Enough of one to come pretty close to shouting at me about it when you were still . . . expecting me to act like them," he says, changing his mind about how to phrase that more or less as it's coming out of his mouth, steering away from being more specific about what Bucky expected, and away from Pierce's name. 

Bucky gives him a wry, sideways look that says he heard it anyway, but hearing the unspoken and hearing the words are two different things and they both know it. "Yeah, well," he says. "I didn't trust you. And you did a reasonable job pretending that didn't gut you for months, by the way. Probably the best lying you've ever done." 

"You didn't have any reason to," Steve replies, matching his tone, both of them knowing they're lying again with that. After a minute he traces a few curves on Bucky's knee, over the places where cotton folds up and folds over and asks, quietly, "What changed?" 

Bucky looks at him for a while before he answers. And if Steve's gotten used to how sometimes Bucky seems unhappily, worryingly young - well right now he seems the opposite. Seems maybe as old as he is, with the years he lived, dragged in and out of the cold, that Steve spent in uninterrupted sleep. 

"I got tired," Bucky says, looking down at the bed, and then through it. He gives a one-shoulder shrug. "And if I couldn't find some way to figure out what was real or not it was gonna kill me. I'd eat a bullet or walk off a pier somewhere and breathe deep on the way down." His gaze moves to his hands, his right hand pushing back the sleeve on his left arm. He shrugs again. "If what I remembered was real . . ." He stops for a second, looking at his left hand. "If it was real, I wanted it," he says. "All of it, everything I could remember. And if you were Pierce all over again . . . " Bucky traces the places where the metal overlaps at his wrist. "At least I knew what was coming." 

Steve can't say anything.

Bucky spreads his left-hand fingers out and then looks at Steve and says, "I almost cut my own throat anyway." He shakes his head, looking away, and Steve wonders what his own face says; his throat's too tightly closed to speak. "Doesn't matter," Bucky goes on. "The point is this shit doesn't _have_ any kind of point anymore." He drops the box on the floor beside the bed, takes every pile into one pile and drops them on top. "If you were there I don't know what memories are mine and which are yours now and it doesn't matter," he says. "And the ones you weren't - there's nothing in the fucking things I want that much. Not in fucking . . . " his right hand moves, like he's trying to catch the word, "narrative, anyway, I guess. Not like that." 

Steve's chest hurts, the way that makes people call it _heart ache_ but has more to do with breathing, and how sometimes you can't. It takes him a while before he can find the right tone to say, "You know what the problem with you is?" 

Bucky snorts. "You want that by letter or rough size?" he demands. "Because that's a long list, Steve." 

"You make it God-damned hard to live up to you," Steve informs him, and takes some satisfaction in the startled look, startled pause before Bucky tries to laugh it off, like Steve expected him to. 

"You're full of shit, you little punk," Bucky says, falling back on old insults because Steve threw him off-balance (Steve knows it). But he cooperates without much reluctance when Steve tugs on his ankle to pull him over to lie down, Steve turning over on his back so Bucky can curve his right arm around Steve's ribs, then scrunch up the pillow so Bucky can tuck it up against Steve's arm where it can do his neck some good. 

"I'm not, though," Steve says, after a minute, quietly. "I've never lied to you. Well - " he says, and he doesn't miss the irony in how honesty compels him to add, "I mean, pretending I wasn't upset about stuff doesn't count. That's not what I mean. I mean - " 

"I know, Steve," Bucky interrupts, voice fond, exasperated and tired. "Believe me, watching your face when you hit something you don't want to tell me is hilarious." 

"I bet it is, to you," Steve replies, happy enough to let Bucky turn the conversation to one side now. "Jerk." 

"Mmn," Bucky says, wordless agreement. "Crazy jerk, no less." 

"You're not crazy," Steve objects, and Bucky snorts. 

"See _now_ you're lying," he says. "Shut up and go to sleep, Steve." 

"You go to sleep," Steve retorts, since apparently they're going back to thirteen or so. 

"The way you keep on talking, nobody could sleep," Bucky counters, proving it, and then adds, "Seriously, Steve, it's two in the morning, shut the fuck up and go to sleep." 

"Fine," Steve says. And then adds, "Good night," because sometimes thirteen is hard to let go of. Then he laughs, a little, and catches Bucky's hand to make him stop digging his thumb-knucke into Steve's ribs, interlaces their fingers instead.


End file.
